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US online grocery sales hit record $7.2B in June

207 points by prostoalex 6y ago

treelovinhippie 6y ago
Interesting cultural difference with Australia (25 million people) where online grocery sales are ~USD$4B: https://www.ibisworld.com/au/industry/online-grocery-sales/5527/ https://www.ibisworld.com/au/industry/online-grocery-sales/5...
- dmurray 6y ago
  There's not much difference. Those are yearly numbers. Australians are spending about half as much per person per year as Americans, but the Australian number seems to be at least partly pre-coronavirus.
mc32 6y ago
Well, you gotta get your good one way or another. If the restaurants are closed, you have to make your own. Wonder if this will last long enough for some people to decide they like home cooking more than taking out... (maybe they bought additional kitchen appliances, etc) On the other hand once people have to return to the office they will have less discretionary time for cooking...
- saagarjha 6y ago
  You could also go out and buy your groceries, which is what many people do…
  - ab_testing 6y ago
    I think that a lot of people are doing online ordering with instore pickup. I am pretty sure that will count as online grocery sales. But then you drive to walmart, open your trunk and let a human load it in your car.
    - asdff 6y ago
      With the added benefit of grocery workers mostly having good sense of arranging the contents inside a bag, and the box not having to sit out all day before you get to it.
- cm2187 6y ago
  I bought a draft beer machine. Best investment ever!
  - koolba 6y ago
    Details?!
    - cm2187 6y ago
      Perfectdraft. I picked it because you can buy some German Munich beer (though the kegs are all out of stock right now!).
nawgszy 6y ago
This article feels a bit "no shit", but there are a few interesting numbers in the table there. * August 2019, 16.1million monthly users, 1.2billion revenue * March 2020, 39.5million monthly users, 4billion revenue * June 2020, 45.6million monthly, 7.2billion revenue Not sure how best to format on here, but this is apparently a high growth thing both before and during covid.
- feteru 6y ago
  Definitely one of the more rapidly growing parts of the convenience economy. With the much higher average spend and less time dependence, grocery delivery looks much more palatable as an investment and lasting market.
  - asdff 6y ago
    I think it will end up beat by curbside grocery pickup. What is more palatable: a grocery bag assorted with care by grocery store staff who sort things by size and weight when they bag all the time and spend quite a bit of time selecting and arranging the choiciest fruit in the store, carefully lowered into the trunk of your vehicle when you appear in front of the store on your way home, or a grocery bag left on your porch hours ago by someone incentivized to work as fast as humanly possible and pee into bottles in their high interest leased car while they hustle to the next gig?
    - majormajor 6y ago
      I'm curious why we have this view that the in-store pickup order worker wouldn't end up just as "optimized" as the general online shopping warehouse worker.
- majormajor 6y ago
  The March vs August numbers aren't very meaningful to me without January/February. March was definitely in the thick of it, stay-at-home wise.
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Simulacra 6y ago
For those who don’t want to have to wear a mask to the grocery store this might be the option for them.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  Even with a mask you're putting yourself at some risk. This is the safest option for anyone who can afford it.
  - givehimagun 6y ago
    Some of my friends who use the delivery service are immune-compromised. Feels like a win/win for them even if it costs more.
    - skellera 6y ago
      I’ve been thinking about prices that make this worth it. Amazon Fresh is free delivery over a certain amount with Prime. I’m sure I’m paying a bit more per item but it can’t be more than the time I’m saving by not browsing and avoiding impulse buys. It seems like a win-win for me. Does anyone have a counter to that?
      - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
        Some people enjoy grocery shopping. Some consider it low-key exercise (for office workers that do not engage in any actual sports, it's often the 2nd most strenuous regular activity, just after sex). It's also furthering the trend towards isolation, the segregation into precarious low-wage service jobs vs a feudal class mostly busy with co-ordinating this personal army of theirs. The latter can afford this because they have institutionalised power structures that have kept lower incomes flat for half a century while the tax structure was turned on its head, with the highest incomes now paying lower rates than day labourers. One would assume that high-paying jobs somehow correlate with value generation. But when shit hit the fan, they were the first to be sent home for half a year and economists are still trying to find anyone who actually noticed that regional key-account managers were mostly just busy with creating funny zoom backgrounds. Online sales obviously kill brick-and-mortar retail, which leads to whatever the opposite of a liveable city is. Large companies tend to run more efficiently. Or, more accurately, they are wasteful in ways that do not have the side benefits of, say, a single-proprietor sponsoring some small-town event because that's "how it's done", or continuing to employ someone even when it's a bad business decision, because they have worked with them for a decade and feel a sense of responsibility. They also heavily favour concentration of market share with just one or very few companies, who are more powerful in relation to customers, employees, and the state. While gains in efficiencies have so far dominated, the beneficiaries of this shift in power will at some point try to cash it in. Other than that, it's pretty cool.
axaxs 6y ago
Grocery shopping was one of my guilty pleasures. Gets me out of the house, walking around, thinking of combinations to cook, etc. Since March, I've been 100% Instacart, and notice them all over my neighborhood each day, so certainly I see the mentioned explosion. That said, I miss shopping and to be honest, Instacart is both expensive and unreliable. I'll go back to in store once things die down, and I'm sure many others will too. Meaning, I think this is more of a spike than a long term trend.
- pen2l 6y ago
  I’m experiencing almost the opposite. I am enjoying being able to reflect through out the day, being able to add items to my cart anytime in the day or the next). I like how much time and gas is saved. I don’t have to change from my pj’s in the weekend, so it reduces some physical and mental overload as well! It’s been an unbelievable boon for me, and it’s worth every extra penny that delivery costs.
  - derwiki 6y ago
    It also helps you hold yourself accountable to healthy eating (if that's a goal of yours). I'm surprised how much I like Instacart delivery, and am planning to keep using it after pandemic.
  - anon9001 6y ago
    I used to eat pretty much exclusively a mix of fast-food, restaurants, and the occasional frozen meal. Now I'm 100% delivery until there's a reliable vaccine, and I have been since February. I'm also brand new to cooking and baking, and never really "shopped" at a grocery store in any meaningful sense, so all the things I'm buying from instacart are first-time purchases. I've never made a grocery shopping list. This is all new to me. I'm having an exact mix of both of your experiences. I just expect that about 10% of the order will be wrong somehow. I'm sure it's very annoying if you're shopping on a budget, but given that I'm learning to cook and bake and make use of whatever is around, precision isn't super important to me for most items. I'm also using instacart as my shopping list, which is great, but it's a shopping list tied to one specific store, which is less great. Here's some free advice for instacart's product team: * Let me set all items in my order to "no substitutions" and toggle it on for items I absolutely can't be without. Or toggle "all substitutions" and don't nag me to approve each one as they happen. This is the most annoying part of interacting with the app. Just add a "mark all as no substitution" button in your next build, please, I know you can do it quickly. * Help me shop better. Your "Explore" interface is laughably bad. Cart management is hard. I don't have a solution for you here, other than do it better. Browsing large stores on a mobile device is hard, but this is what you should be working to solve. Improve the UI of shopping as a whole. Spend some innovation tokens here. What you should be trying to do is help me map the universe of products in a way that lets me express my preferences, so you already know which items I consider acceptable substitutes. With enough people doing that, you have seriously valuable ML data. Once you know what I want to buy and what realistic substitution preferences are, you should be shopping for me across every store in my area to find the best overall deal for my cart that fits my requirements. * Why is the shopper texting me at all? Using the service makes me feel like I'm tethered to my phone or I'm a bad person. If I don't stay connected, your shopper is going to be stressed about my order, and I'm going to end up getting the wrong thing. Your goal should be to remove anxiety from using your service, not increase it by keeping me tethered to my device while I'm visualizing someone else plucking items off the shelves. I've had 1 shopper that didn't text me at all and we communicated entirely through the "approve/deny" substitution buttons, which was still annoying, but less bad than the messages I get from other shoppers. * WTF is with your fee structure? The app tells me the prices are higher than in-store AND there's a service fee AND there's a tip. This shouldn't be so complicated. I want to see "cost of items in store - cost of items on instacart", "amount paid to shopper", and "amount paid to instacart". The item cost can be savings or marked up due to increase demand or heavy weight or whatever, just be honest about the actual difference between going to the store and ordering on instacart. I know instacart should be paid, just show how many dollars go to paying instacart. I know the shopper is getting paid something already, show me how much, so I can tip accordingly, and you'll probably see a dramatic increase in tips. Instacart is one of the more broken products that I use because it still delivers value. I get that they'll survive without fixing any of the stuff above, but it's a shame to see the opportunity wasted to build something really great.
amiga_500 6y ago
Covid killed restaurants, a local fresh produce supplier switched from restaurants to the public. The fruit and veg is great quality. I would order online from them forever, but I suspect in time they will switch back to restaurants and I will be left with poor quality supermarket fare.
gdubs 6y ago
Instacart has a really smart tactic in showing you how many hours you’ve saved shopping. Ordinarily I love grocery shopping but after having done online for several months now, I’m not sure I’ll go back. I imagine I’ll order the bulk of the items online, and visit the specialty / small grocers to pick out the odds and ends that are special. Farm boxes are great too, for organic produce (and growing a garden!).
- odysseus 6y ago
  Wonder how they calculate this with any accuracy. They can't see the time you spend comparison shopping on other online sites to see if you're getting a good deal. (which you usually aren't - Target and Costco, for example, often dramatically raise their online prices vs. their in-store prices) Agree on the farm boxes - had one of those and we were overloaded with produce. Bit expensive but once you taste fresh carrots it's hard to go back to store bought.
anonms-coward 6y ago
Unfortunately this would also mean the end of small business owned grocery stores has been greatly accelerated.
InfiniteRand 6y ago
For me the hassle of scheduling the online order really took the shine off of online grocery shopping. Expense was also a factor, but if I need to stay up till 2 AM to schedule an order, I would rather just stock up more in fewer grocery trips and try to go for odd hours
- eyeball 6y ago
  Why are you having to stay up until 2 am? I've had no problem filling my cart and getting a delivery time any time I want. There were some "delivery windows are full" problems early in the pandemic, but no problems now. Most sites I use make it easy to re-order past purchases so I can get my shopping done in 5 minutes most weeks.
  - graeme 6y ago
    Highly dependent on local areas and chains, I suspect. In my city, there were no delivery slots for weeks with most chains, just one had pickup. Now they pretty much all have it scaled. But I could imagine some places don’t, especially cities with surging cases and new lockdowns.
  - chapium 6y ago
    Jewel/ Safeway/ Albertsons online ordering systems are abysmal. Very high friction to browse, endless searching, and when you get to the end you find out that the items you selected are not in inventory for that store. The switch sizes and brands like there was no consideration for price or storage preference.
compumike 6y ago
If you're in the Bay Area and have a car, I'd recommend checking out Cheetah [1]. It's a startup that pivoted [2] from doing restaurant wholesale deliveries (from Restaurant Depot, which only sells to restaurants!) to doing drive-through pickup for consumers. You place an order by app, drive up to one of their parked refrigerated trucks at the scheduled time, and say your name. They load your trunk, and you're done. It's taken the majority of my grocery spend in the past few months and I hope the concept remains post-pandemic. By doing pickup, you get pretty good convenience (almost as good as delivery), great pricing, and somewhat limited selection (but always reflected in-app at order time, rather than surprising you at pickup time). That's a tradeoff that works for me. A few months ago you could only order restaurant-sized quantities of things (like minimum 25 lbs of bananas), but they've since started making more items available in "family friendly" sizes (3 lbs bananas, $1.80). (They do have a $20-off your first order referral promotion I'll mention [3] in case you want to try it, but I'm just a happy customer who wants to see the concept take off.) [1] https://www.gocheetah.com/ https://www.gocheetah.com/ [2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/cheetah-a-restaurant-wholesale-app-that-pivoted-to-consumers-for-covid-19-nabs-36m/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/cheetah-a-restaurant-whole... [3] Enter referral code "2EA2666F" at sign-up or https://cheetah.onelink.me/j187/7b49398d https://cheetah.onelink.me/j187/7b49398d
- scarface74 6y ago
  Aren’t many local grocery stores doing curbside pickup? Locally Walmart and Kroger is.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    They are, but they're just not very good at it in my experience. I tried my local store's curbside pickup and I got no butter plus salsa instead of pasta sauce.
    - throwaway43234 6y ago
      Protip: store bought salsa makes a better pasta sauce than store bought pasta sauce. (Controversial) protip: home made salsa makes a better pasta sauce than home made pasta sauce
cameronh90 6y ago
These numbers seem very high - even before Covid. Does anyone know the rough market share of that US$7.2bn in June? Is Instacart really scaling that high, with their inefficient personal shopper approach, or is Walmart really killing it? Additionally, to compare internationally, the UK reportedly spent US$15bn in the entire of 2018 compared to the US' ~$24bn. But the UK online grocery market is much more established - every major supermarket (except Lidl/Aldi) has direct warehouse to customer deliveries by van, in addition to Prime Now, Amazon Fresh, Ocado and others. I'm struggling to reconcile the difference even accounting for the 5x population difference. Lived experience suggests that online grocery shopping throughout the UK is very prevalent but (perhaps until recently) was fairly atypical in most of the US. Possible explanations are the value of orders is greater in the US, or online grocery deliveries has a wider classification? Personally I don't use online grocery shopping in London most of the time as I live next to a supermarket. Is that perhaps more common than I realise?
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Before covid, about 10% of Tesco's sales were online; more like 15% now. So it's common, but not THAT common.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  > every major supermarket (except Lidl/Aldi) has direct warehouse to customer deliveries by van While obviously an Ocado order comes from a warehouse built for this purpose all the high street supermarkets near me are delivering from their existing stores. The Sainsbury's I use at the moment because it's right down the road and huge (so I can shop every eight days to get everything with only one exposure) has a fleet of delivery vans based there. Some also have "dark" stores that don't serve any walk-in customers but my impression is that they aren't cloning Ocado, even Waitrose (whose produce is sold by Ocado) would sell me stuff from the Waitrose near me, not a warehouse.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I think there are two things that explain the difference. 1. Tesco was a pioneer in the sector, they really did push it all forward. 2. The grocery sector is much more competitive in the UK. Although Tesco is big it is nowhere near the dominance of Walmart in the US.
WalterBright 6y ago
Looks like Amazon invested into that business at just the right moment.
digitalice 6y ago
Webvan 2020!
jblarneyforward 6y ago
B B m f em m L
grawprog 6y ago
This probably isn't going to fly here but...I don't like online grocery shopping and hope that it never fully replaces grocery stores. I appreciate the increase in options for people who do want it, but it should never become the only option. Things like fresh produce, dairy and meat I need to choose myself. Looking at pictures of these things on a website is not even close to the same thing. Each individual one of those things is different. They vary in quality and weight and to be honest, I don't really trust a grocery store clerk to examine these things for me. Grocery delivery just creates yet another disconnect between us and where our food comes from. Grocery stores themselves are already fairly far removed from our food sources, but at least there we have the option to still examine our food and choose it before purchase Food's become far too impersonal and inhuman as it is. It's one of the most important things for us(and a large majority of life out there). It should be respected and people should never forget where their food comes from. The way we treat food production in general in modern times is pretty appalling as is. Continuing to remove people further from their food is a step in the wrong direction and just promotes yet more mass consolidation of production of food. Eventually, it's going to cut out a ton of businesses in between, small food producers will suffer and large conglomerates selling bland homogenized crap will take over and globally supply the population with their mass produced delivered food.
- nwienert 6y ago
  A local butcher started doing delivery where I live and they deliver incredibly high quality meat. It’s been a revelation. I combine that with two other sources for delivery: Costco via Instacart, which gets you all the bulk needs and some produce, basically you never have to worry about quality. And then Amazon Fresh for cheap staples and pantry items. We have a really high quality vegetarian market too that delivers on Instacart. If you do it wrong, you essentially will have a bad time. Amazon has horrible meat and not great produce, but Costco and the local butcher have amazing stuff. I used to hate shopping for groceries online, but in all honesty it’s gotten quite good if you live in the right area and figure out good places to look. I’ve changed my mind.
  - awinder 6y ago
    How did you go about finding a local butcher, I’ve found locally that this isn’t like a thing where people have a large web presence & giant “this is where you should be buying meat” lit signs pointing the way
olah_1 6y ago
Are there any online grocery delivery services that accept crypto currency like BTC or ETH?
crazygringo 6y ago
I've got to say, that while FreshDirect has always been way more expensive than my local grocery store, Amazon Fresh has always been way cheaper. Waaay cheaper. I live in New York City, and I manage to save about 40% on my grocery bill using Amazon Fresh. Whether it's crackers, nuts, chocolate, sausage, ice cream, whatever -- everything that's not extremely perishable is somewhere between 30% and 50% cheaper on Amazon. (I buy everything except fresh veggies, meat, dairy, eggs and bread on Amazon now.) I like the experience of shopping at my local store. But when I see that spending $90 there turns into spending $55 at Amazon... it's pretty much a no-brainer. And I spend a half-hour walking at a park instead of walking around the aisles of a grocery store and waiting in line for ten minutes.
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  Just curious, does that 40% decrease include shipping costs? Or do you use Amazon Prime? I have often found that Amazon's initial prices are cheaper, but if you pay for shipping it comes out to about the same, sometimes more, than a local grocery store. I live in Michigan so that may be different than NYC.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Yeah I have Prime so Fresh shipping is free. I don't think I'd consider Fresh as an option at all without it. (But I already consider Prime to be worth it just for my regular Amazon purchases, so I don't really even factor it into the Fresh price.)
dhosek 6y ago
I bet the people behind Peapod regret shutting down their Midwest business in February. https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-peapod-closing-in-midwest-20200211-5eqsre53cfaavgbhboiq4ulshy-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-peapod-closin...
ponker 6y ago
Lot of people here complaining that grocery delivery sucks because the shoppers pick bad produce. That's because the current business models treat grocery shopping as unskilled labor. I certainly don't think that picking a good peach or watermelon is an unskilled job. In fact any time my wife gets complex produce like that it sucks and I have stopped asking her to buy any produce. Spending an hour to go and pick some high quality food is a skill that, if you want it done right, will cost you some money. This is possible to do as even fancy restaurants have employees who they trust to obtain the correct produce that they need. All it needs is a consistent shopper on a week-to-week basis (so they can learn what you want) and the willingness of the customer to pay appropriately.

207 points by prostoalex 6y ago

Interesting cultural difference with Australia (25 million people) where online grocery sales are ~USD$4B: https://www.ibisworld.com/au/industry/online-grocery-sales/5527/ https://www.ibisworld.com/au/industry/online-grocery-sales/5...

dmurray 6y ago
There's not much difference. Those are yearly numbers. Australians are spending about half as much per person per year as Americans, but the Australian number seems to be at least partly pre-coronavirus.

mc32 6y ago

Well, you gotta get your good one way or another. If the restaurants are closed, you have to make your own. Wonder if this will last long enough for some people to decide they like home cooking more than taking out... (maybe they bought additional kitchen appliances, etc) On the other hand once people have to return to the office they will have less discretionary time for cooking...

saagarjha 6y ago
You could also go out and buy your groceries, which is what many people do…
- ab_testing 6y ago
  I think that a lot of people are doing online ordering with instore pickup. I am pretty sure that will count as online grocery sales. But then you drive to walmart, open your trunk and let a human load it in your car.
  - asdff 6y ago
    With the added benefit of grocery workers mostly having good sense of arranging the contents inside a bag, and the box not having to sit out all day before you get to it.
cm2187 6y ago
I bought a draft beer machine. Best investment ever!
- koolba 6y ago
  Details?!
  - cm2187 6y ago
    Perfectdraft. I picked it because you can buy some German Munich beer (though the kegs are all out of stock right now!).

nawgszy 6y ago

This article feels a bit "no shit", but there are a few interesting numbers in the table there. * August 2019, 16.1million monthly users, 1.2billion revenue * March 2020, 39.5million monthly users, 4billion revenue * June 2020, 45.6million monthly, 7.2billion revenue Not sure how best to format on here, but this is apparently a high growth thing both before and during covid.

feteru 6y ago
Definitely one of the more rapidly growing parts of the convenience economy. With the much higher average spend and less time dependence, grocery delivery looks much more palatable as an investment and lasting market.
- asdff 6y ago
  I think it will end up beat by curbside grocery pickup. What is more palatable: a grocery bag assorted with care by grocery store staff who sort things by size and weight when they bag all the time and spend quite a bit of time selecting and arranging the choiciest fruit in the store, carefully lowered into the trunk of your vehicle when you appear in front of the store on your way home, or a grocery bag left on your porch hours ago by someone incentivized to work as fast as humanly possible and pee into bottles in their high interest leased car while they hustle to the next gig?
  - majormajor 6y ago
    I'm curious why we have this view that the in-store pickup order worker wouldn't end up just as "optimized" as the general online shopping warehouse worker.
majormajor 6y ago
The March vs August numbers aren't very meaningful to me without January/February. March was definitely in the thick of it, stay-at-home wise.
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Simulacra 6y ago

For those who don’t want to have to wear a mask to the grocery store this might be the option for them.

_bxg1 6y ago
Even with a mask you're putting yourself at some risk. This is the safest option for anyone who can afford it.
- givehimagun 6y ago
  Some of my friends who use the delivery service are immune-compromised. Feels like a win/win for them even if it costs more.
  - skellera 6y ago
    I’ve been thinking about prices that make this worth it. Amazon Fresh is free delivery over a certain amount with Prime. I’m sure I’m paying a bit more per item but it can’t be more than the time I’m saving by not browsing and avoiding impulse buys. It seems like a win-win for me. Does anyone have a counter to that?
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
      Some people enjoy grocery shopping. Some consider it low-key exercise (for office workers that do not engage in any actual sports, it's often the 2nd most strenuous regular activity, just after sex). It's also furthering the trend towards isolation, the segregation into precarious low-wage service jobs vs a feudal class mostly busy with co-ordinating this personal army of theirs. The latter can afford this because they have institutionalised power structures that have kept lower incomes flat for half a century while the tax structure was turned on its head, with the highest incomes now paying lower rates than day labourers. One would assume that high-paying jobs somehow correlate with value generation. But when shit hit the fan, they were the first to be sent home for half a year and economists are still trying to find anyone who actually noticed that regional key-account managers were mostly just busy with creating funny zoom backgrounds. Online sales obviously kill brick-and-mortar retail, which leads to whatever the opposite of a liveable city is. Large companies tend to run more efficiently. Or, more accurately, they are wasteful in ways that do not have the side benefits of, say, a single-proprietor sponsoring some small-town event because that's "how it's done", or continuing to employ someone even when it's a bad business decision, because they have worked with them for a decade and feel a sense of responsibility. They also heavily favour concentration of market share with just one or very few companies, who are more powerful in relation to customers, employees, and the state. While gains in efficiencies have so far dominated, the beneficiaries of this shift in power will at some point try to cash it in. Other than that, it's pretty cool.

axaxs 6y ago

Grocery shopping was one of my guilty pleasures. Gets me out of the house, walking around, thinking of combinations to cook, etc. Since March, I've been 100% Instacart, and notice them all over my neighborhood each day, so certainly I see the mentioned explosion. That said, I miss shopping and to be honest, Instacart is both expensive and unreliable. I'll go back to in store once things die down, and I'm sure many others will too. Meaning, I think this is more of a spike than a long term trend.

pen2l 6y ago
I’m experiencing almost the opposite. I am enjoying being able to reflect through out the day, being able to add items to my cart anytime in the day or the next). I like how much time and gas is saved. I don’t have to change from my pj’s in the weekend, so it reduces some physical and mental overload as well! It’s been an unbelievable boon for me, and it’s worth every extra penny that delivery costs.
- derwiki 6y ago
  It also helps you hold yourself accountable to healthy eating (if that's a goal of yours). I'm surprised how much I like Instacart delivery, and am planning to keep using it after pandemic.
- anon9001 6y ago
  I used to eat pretty much exclusively a mix of fast-food, restaurants, and the occasional frozen meal. Now I'm 100% delivery until there's a reliable vaccine, and I have been since February. I'm also brand new to cooking and baking, and never really "shopped" at a grocery store in any meaningful sense, so all the things I'm buying from instacart are first-time purchases. I've never made a grocery shopping list. This is all new to me. I'm having an exact mix of both of your experiences. I just expect that about 10% of the order will be wrong somehow. I'm sure it's very annoying if you're shopping on a budget, but given that I'm learning to cook and bake and make use of whatever is around, precision isn't super important to me for most items. I'm also using instacart as my shopping list, which is great, but it's a shopping list tied to one specific store, which is less great. Here's some free advice for instacart's product team: * Let me set all items in my order to "no substitutions" and toggle it on for items I absolutely can't be without. Or toggle "all substitutions" and don't nag me to approve each one as they happen. This is the most annoying part of interacting with the app. Just add a "mark all as no substitution" button in your next build, please, I know you can do it quickly. * Help me shop better. Your "Explore" interface is laughably bad. Cart management is hard. I don't have a solution for you here, other than do it better. Browsing large stores on a mobile device is hard, but this is what you should be working to solve. Improve the UI of shopping as a whole. Spend some innovation tokens here. What you should be trying to do is help me map the universe of products in a way that lets me express my preferences, so you already know which items I consider acceptable substitutes. With enough people doing that, you have seriously valuable ML data. Once you know what I want to buy and what realistic substitution preferences are, you should be shopping for me across every store in my area to find the best overall deal for my cart that fits my requirements. * Why is the shopper texting me at all? Using the service makes me feel like I'm tethered to my phone or I'm a bad person. If I don't stay connected, your shopper is going to be stressed about my order, and I'm going to end up getting the wrong thing. Your goal should be to remove anxiety from using your service, not increase it by keeping me tethered to my device while I'm visualizing someone else plucking items off the shelves. I've had 1 shopper that didn't text me at all and we communicated entirely through the "approve/deny" substitution buttons, which was still annoying, but less bad than the messages I get from other shoppers. * WTF is with your fee structure? The app tells me the prices are higher than in-store AND there's a service fee AND there's a tip. This shouldn't be so complicated. I want to see "cost of items in store - cost of items on instacart", "amount paid to shopper", and "amount paid to instacart". The item cost can be savings or marked up due to increase demand or heavy weight or whatever, just be honest about the actual difference between going to the store and ordering on instacart. I know instacart should be paid, just show how many dollars go to paying instacart. I know the shopper is getting paid something already, show me how much, so I can tip accordingly, and you'll probably see a dramatic increase in tips. Instacart is one of the more broken products that I use because it still delivers value. I get that they'll survive without fixing any of the stuff above, but it's a shame to see the opportunity wasted to build something really great.

amiga_500 6y ago

Covid killed restaurants, a local fresh produce supplier switched from restaurants to the public. The fruit and veg is great quality. I would order online from them forever, but I suspect in time they will switch back to restaurants and I will be left with poor quality supermarket fare.

gdubs 6y ago

Instacart has a really smart tactic in showing you how many hours you’ve saved shopping. Ordinarily I love grocery shopping but after having done online for several months now, I’m not sure I’ll go back. I imagine I’ll order the bulk of the items online, and visit the specialty / small grocers to pick out the odds and ends that are special. Farm boxes are great too, for organic produce (and growing a garden!).

odysseus 6y ago
Wonder how they calculate this with any accuracy. They can't see the time you spend comparison shopping on other online sites to see if you're getting a good deal. (which you usually aren't - Target and Costco, for example, often dramatically raise their online prices vs. their in-store prices) Agree on the farm boxes - had one of those and we were overloaded with produce. Bit expensive but once you taste fresh carrots it's hard to go back to store bought.

anonms-coward 6y ago

Unfortunately this would also mean the end of small business owned grocery stores has been greatly accelerated.

InfiniteRand 6y ago

For me the hassle of scheduling the online order really took the shine off of online grocery shopping. Expense was also a factor, but if I need to stay up till 2 AM to schedule an order, I would rather just stock up more in fewer grocery trips and try to go for odd hours

eyeball 6y ago
Why are you having to stay up until 2 am? I've had no problem filling my cart and getting a delivery time any time I want. There were some "delivery windows are full" problems early in the pandemic, but no problems now. Most sites I use make it easy to re-order past purchases so I can get my shopping done in 5 minutes most weeks.
- graeme 6y ago
  Highly dependent on local areas and chains, I suspect. In my city, there were no delivery slots for weeks with most chains, just one had pickup. Now they pretty much all have it scaled. But I could imagine some places don’t, especially cities with surging cases and new lockdowns.
- chapium 6y ago
  Jewel/ Safeway/ Albertsons online ordering systems are abysmal. Very high friction to browse, endless searching, and when you get to the end you find out that the items you selected are not in inventory for that store. The switch sizes and brands like there was no consideration for price or storage preference.

compumike 6y ago

If you're in the Bay Area and have a car, I'd recommend checking out Cheetah [1]. It's a startup that pivoted [2] from doing restaurant wholesale deliveries (from Restaurant Depot, which only sells to restaurants!) to doing drive-through pickup for consumers. You place an order by app, drive up to one of their parked refrigerated trucks at the scheduled time, and say your name. They load your trunk, and you're done. It's taken the majority of my grocery spend in the past few months and I hope the concept remains post-pandemic. By doing pickup, you get pretty good convenience (almost as good as delivery), great pricing, and somewhat limited selection (but always reflected in-app at order time, rather than surprising you at pickup time). That's a tradeoff that works for me. A few months ago you could only order restaurant-sized quantities of things (like minimum 25 lbs of bananas), but they've since started making more items available in "family friendly" sizes (3 lbs bananas, $1.80). (They do have a $20-off your first order referral promotion I'll mention [3] in case you want to try it, but I'm just a happy customer who wants to see the concept take off.) [1] https://www.gocheetah.com/ https://www.gocheetah.com/ [2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/cheetah-a-restaurant-wholesale-app-that-pivoted-to-consumers-for-covid-19-nabs-36m/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/cheetah-a-restaurant-whole... [3] Enter referral code "2EA2666F" at sign-up or https://cheetah.onelink.me/j187/7b49398d https://cheetah.onelink.me/j187/7b49398d

scarface74 6y ago
Aren’t many local grocery stores doing curbside pickup? Locally Walmart and Kroger is.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  They are, but they're just not very good at it in my experience. I tried my local store's curbside pickup and I got no butter plus salsa instead of pasta sauce.
  - throwaway43234 6y ago
    Protip: store bought salsa makes a better pasta sauce than store bought pasta sauce. (Controversial) protip: home made salsa makes a better pasta sauce than home made pasta sauce

cameronh90 6y ago

These numbers seem very high - even before Covid. Does anyone know the rough market share of that US$7.2bn in June? Is Instacart really scaling that high, with their inefficient personal shopper approach, or is Walmart really killing it? Additionally, to compare internationally, the UK reportedly spent US$15bn in the entire of 2018 compared to the US' ~$24bn. But the UK online grocery market is much more established - every major supermarket (except Lidl/Aldi) has direct warehouse to customer deliveries by van, in addition to Prime Now, Amazon Fresh, Ocado and others. I'm struggling to reconcile the difference even accounting for the 5x population difference. Lived experience suggests that online grocery shopping throughout the UK is very prevalent but (perhaps until recently) was fairly atypical in most of the US. Possible explanations are the value of orders is greater in the US, or online grocery deliveries has a wider classification? Personally I don't use online grocery shopping in London most of the time as I live next to a supermarket. Is that perhaps more common than I realise?

rsynnott 6y ago
Before covid, about 10% of Tesco's sales were online; more like 15% now. So it's common, but not THAT common.
tialaramex 6y ago
> every major supermarket (except Lidl/Aldi) has direct warehouse to customer deliveries by van While obviously an Ocado order comes from a warehouse built for this purpose all the high street supermarkets near me are delivering from their existing stores. The Sainsbury's I use at the moment because it's right down the road and huge (so I can shop every eight days to get everything with only one exposure) has a fleet of delivery vans based there. Some also have "dark" stores that don't serve any walk-in customers but my impression is that they aren't cloning Ocado, even Waitrose (whose produce is sold by Ocado) would sell me stuff from the Waitrose near me, not a warehouse.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I think there are two things that explain the difference. 1. Tesco was a pioneer in the sector, they really did push it all forward. 2. The grocery sector is much more competitive in the UK. Although Tesco is big it is nowhere near the dominance of Walmart in the US.

WalterBright 6y ago

Looks like Amazon invested into that business at just the right moment.

digitalice 6y ago

Webvan 2020!

jblarneyforward 6y ago

B B m f em m L

grawprog 6y ago

This probably isn't going to fly here but...I don't like online grocery shopping and hope that it never fully replaces grocery stores. I appreciate the increase in options for people who do want it, but it should never become the only option. Things like fresh produce, dairy and meat I need to choose myself. Looking at pictures of these things on a website is not even close to the same thing. Each individual one of those things is different. They vary in quality and weight and to be honest, I don't really trust a grocery store clerk to examine these things for me. Grocery delivery just creates yet another disconnect between us and where our food comes from. Grocery stores themselves are already fairly far removed from our food sources, but at least there we have the option to still examine our food and choose it before purchase Food's become far too impersonal and inhuman as it is. It's one of the most important things for us(and a large majority of life out there). It should be respected and people should never forget where their food comes from. The way we treat food production in general in modern times is pretty appalling as is. Continuing to remove people further from their food is a step in the wrong direction and just promotes yet more mass consolidation of production of food. Eventually, it's going to cut out a ton of businesses in between, small food producers will suffer and large conglomerates selling bland homogenized crap will take over and globally supply the population with their mass produced delivered food.

nwienert 6y ago
A local butcher started doing delivery where I live and they deliver incredibly high quality meat. It’s been a revelation. I combine that with two other sources for delivery: Costco via Instacart, which gets you all the bulk needs and some produce, basically you never have to worry about quality. And then Amazon Fresh for cheap staples and pantry items. We have a really high quality vegetarian market too that delivers on Instacart. If you do it wrong, you essentially will have a bad time. Amazon has horrible meat and not great produce, but Costco and the local butcher have amazing stuff. I used to hate shopping for groceries online, but in all honesty it’s gotten quite good if you live in the right area and figure out good places to look. I’ve changed my mind.
- awinder 6y ago
  How did you go about finding a local butcher, I’ve found locally that this isn’t like a thing where people have a large web presence & giant “this is where you should be buying meat” lit signs pointing the way

olah_1 6y ago

Are there any online grocery delivery services that accept crypto currency like BTC or ETH?

crazygringo 6y ago

I've got to say, that while FreshDirect has always been way more expensive than my local grocery store, Amazon Fresh has always been way cheaper. Waaay cheaper. I live in New York City, and I manage to save about 40% on my grocery bill using Amazon Fresh. Whether it's crackers, nuts, chocolate, sausage, ice cream, whatever -- everything that's not extremely perishable is somewhere between 30% and 50% cheaper on Amazon. (I buy everything except fresh veggies, meat, dairy, eggs and bread on Amazon now.) I like the experience of shopping at my local store. But when I see that spending $90 there turns into spending $55 at Amazon... it's pretty much a no-brainer. And I spend a half-hour walking at a park instead of walking around the aisles of a grocery store and waiting in line for ten minutes.

SamuelAdams 6y ago
Just curious, does that 40% decrease include shipping costs? Or do you use Amazon Prime? I have often found that Amazon's initial prices are cheaper, but if you pay for shipping it comes out to about the same, sometimes more, than a local grocery store. I live in Michigan so that may be different than NYC.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Yeah I have Prime so Fresh shipping is free. I don't think I'd consider Fresh as an option at all without it. (But I already consider Prime to be worth it just for my regular Amazon purchases, so I don't really even factor it into the Fresh price.)

dhosek 6y ago

I bet the people behind Peapod regret shutting down their Midwest business in February. https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-peapod-closing-in-midwest-20200211-5eqsre53cfaavgbhboiq4ulshy-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-peapod-closin...

ponker 6y ago

Lot of people here complaining that grocery delivery sucks because the shoppers pick bad produce. That's because the current business models treat grocery shopping as unskilled labor. I certainly don't think that picking a good peach or watermelon is an unskilled job. In fact any time my wife gets complex produce like that it sucks and I have stopped asking her to buy any produce. Spending an hour to go and pick some high quality food is a skill that, if you want it done right, will cost you some money. This is possible to do as even fancy restaurants have employees who they trust to obtain the correct produce that they need. All it needs is a consistent shopper on a week-to-week basis (so they can learn what you want) and the willingness of the customer to pay appropriately.